Xamarin and Microsoft just announced the “Xamarin for Everyone” program at Microsoft’s Build 2016 conference. It included what many of us Xamarin mobile app developers hoped for; an end to the expensive programs, a slot/tier/opportunity to build cool mobile apps for your side project and upgraded integration for building Xamarin based mobile apps in your Visual Studio IDE.
Talking about game changers, this might be one!
Although you can find all the news regarding the new introduced pricing, developer tool changes and upgrades on Xamarin’s blog post I’ll share a quick overview with you all for completeness sake:
- Xamarin integrated standard in every edition of Visual Studio (incl. VS Community Edition)
- Xamarin Studio IDE for everyone with a Visual Studio Professional or Enterprise subscription
- If you want to start kicking it for your next mobile app side-project you can use VS Community Edition OR the newly created Xamarin Studio Community Edition for free
- MS open sources the Xamarin SDK for Android, iOS, and Mac under the MIT license in the coming months. This includes native API bindings and the basic command-line tools necessary to develop mobile apps. It also includes the popular cross-platform native UI toolkit, Xamarin.Forms.
- Xamarin Insights will be integrated/merged in HockeyApp to provide a single space for test distribution, bug tracing and more.
This all will ultimately (and hopefully) lead to more people joining the Xamarin development community, faster upgrades for products and libraries like Xamarin.Forms and a more integrated and expanding set of tools and services backed by Microsoft.
I bet this will boost the C# side of the universe to build cross-platform (native) mobile apps versus developing with Cordova hybrid based development too. Let’s watch and see what will happen next.
